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Monday, November 17, 2014

Great Article If You Want to Understand Ukraine & Russia Situation

Understanding what is really going on in Ukraine is not easy for most Americans and people living in the west due to constant corporate media trashing of Putin and the Russian government. Below are a few excerpts from one of the best articles yet on this important subject. It is written by James Petras retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. You can read the entire article entitled Russia’s Vulnerability to EU – US Sanctions and Military Encroachmentshere

From 1990 to 1999, over 6 million Russian citizens died prematurely as a
result of the catastrophic collapse of the economy; life expectancy for
males declined from 67 years during the Soviet era to 55 year during
the Yeltsin period. Russia’s GNP declined sixty percent – a historic
first for a country not at war. Following Yeltsin’s violent seizure of
power and his bombing of the Russian parliament, the regime proceeded
to ‘prioritize’ the privatization of the economy, selling off the
energy, natural resources, banking, transport and communication sectors
at one-tenth or less of their real value to well-connected cronies and
foreign entities.

Of course, the respectable western media celebrated the pillage of
Russia as the transition to “free elections and a free market economy”.
They wrote glowing articles describing the political power and
dominance of gangster oligarchs as the reflection of a rising “liberal
democracy”. The Russian state was thus converted from a global
superpower into an abject client regime penetrated by western
intelligence agencies and unable to govern and enforce its treaties and
agreements with Western powers. The US and EU rapidly displaced Russian
influence in Eastern Europe and quickly snapped up former state-owned
industries, the mass media and financial institutions. Communist and
leftist and even nationalist officials were ousted and replaced by
pliant and subservient ‘free market’ pro-NATO politicians. The US and
EU violated every single agreement signed by Gorbachev and the West:
Eastern European regimes became NATO members; West Germany annexed the
East and military bases were expanded right up to Russia’s borders.
Pro-NATO “think tanks” were established and supplied intelligence and
anti-Russian propaganda. Hundreds of NGOs, funded by the US, operated
within Russia as propaganda and organizing instruments for “subservient”
neo-liberal politicians. In the former Soviet Caucuses and Far East,
the West fomented separatist sectarian movements and armed uprisings,
especially in Chechnya; the US sponsored dictators in the Caucuses and
corrupt neo-liberal puppets in Georgia. The Russian state was colonized
and its putative ruler, Boris Yeltsin, often in a drunken stupor, was
propped up and manipulated to scratch out executive fiats . . . further
disintegrating the state and society.

In 2014, the Western offensive to isolate, encircle and
eventually undermine any possibility of an independent Russian state
went into high gear. The US financed a civil-military coup ousting the
elected regime of [Ukraine's] President Viktor Yanukovytch, who had opposed EU
annexation and NATO affiliation. Washington imposed a puppet regime
deeply hostile to Russia and ethnic Russian-Ukrainian citizens in the
southeast and Crimea. Russian opposition to the coup and support for
pro-democracy federalists in the south-east and Crimea served as a
pretext for Western sanctions in an effort to undermine Russia’s oil,
banking and manufacturing sectors and to cripple its economy.

Despite the short-term successes of the US-EU war against the Russian
economy, the Putin Administration has remained extremely popular among
the Russian electorate, with approval ratings exceeding 80%. This has
relegated Putin’s pro-Western opposition to the dust bin of history.
Nevertheless the Western sanctions policy and the aggressive political –
NATO military encirclement of Russia, has exposed the vulnerabilities
of Moscow.